“The first topic for the summary blog posts is on work-life balance. Why? Because it's Sunday, and I'm splitting my day between writing this blog post, preparing for an upcoming conference, and keeping the Pan-STARRS processing moving along. Clearly, I need to work on my work-life balance. Since I don't have kids, I'm primarily interested in how to make it so that I do more than just work. For me, posts that discuss how to set boundaries, how to say no to things, and how to set a reasonable number of hours to work are what I consider 'work-life balance'. When writing this post, I discovered that the majority of the blog posts on work-life balance are geared towards balancing a family and a career. However, I caution it's not just the women (and men!) with children that want to manage work-life balance, this is something that probably all of us can work on. Making a workplace culture more flexible and family friendly helps everyone out.“

“Kelle Cruz is a rising Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the City University of New York Hunter College. She is an observational astronomer and studies low mass stars and brown dwarfs. She was born and raised in San Antonio, TX. She earned both her BA and PhD in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000 and 2004, respectively. She was an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC from 2004-2007 and then a Spitzer Fellow at Caltech from 2007-2009. She joined the faculty at CUNY in 2010 and was recently awarded tenure and promotion. Kelle is the founder and editor of the AstroBetter.com Blog and Wiki. She is also on the Coordinating Committee for the Astropy Project. As Chair of the AAS Employment Committee she helped expand the professional development workshop offerings at the Winter meeting. Her term as a AAS Councillor begins in June.”

Aylin Woodward and Sarah McQuate, graduate students in the UC Santa Cruz science communication program, worked on a collaborative video project with the UCSC astronomy and astrophysics department. Their 5-minute film, Change from Within, explores the efforts of UCSC astronomers to make their field more welcoming to talented minority and women scientists. In the video four graduate students of color and the department's ambitious chair share the challenges they've faced and potential solutions for the future.

“Postdoctoral fellows hopefully enjoy close mentor-mentee relationships with the principal investigators on their research grants. Few would probably expect those investigators to show up at the hospital after a baby arrived, asking when they planned to return to the lab, however. Yet that’s what happened to one survey participant in a new study on parent postdocs from the National Postdoctoral Association and the Pregnant Scholar project of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings.”

“In 2009, as US President Barack Obama’s staff started work, a third of them noticed that they were not being invited to crucial meetings. And when they were included, their contributions were often overlooked. They were all women – and they decided to act. The staffers began a strategy called ‘amplification’: when a woman made a point in a meeting, another would repeat it, giving credit to their colleague. The move worked: Obama noticed and began calling on more women.”

“This April, The Scientist was searching for the name of an unidentified woman featured in a photo with Jonathan Hartwell, an organic chemist who worked at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The NCI was unable identify her, so we put out a call on social media to see if any of our readers could. A few weeks later, we heard back from architect Kenneth Kornberg—the person in the photo, he wrote, was his mother, Sylvy R. Levy Kornberg, a biochemist who worked with Hartwell at the NCI. She also conducted research at a number of universities, and contributed to work that eventually led to a Nobel prize.”

“The Starmus Festival is now in full swing in Trondheim, Norway, with artists, scientists, and other thinkers gathered around topics relating to space exploration and astronomy. Already, Stephen Hawking has made headlines there for suggesting that humans need to colonize Mars and the Moon ASAP, or move on to Alpha Centauri.

But on Wednesday, some heavy criticism began to emerge on Twitter that the famous festival is heavily skewed towards male panelists—criticism that became louder after Chris Pissardes, a Nobel-winning economist, suggested from the stage that he trusts Siri more when it has a "male" voice.”